EDUC 6201 Education Culture and Diversity: False Memories

Title: False memories

Conway, M. A., & Loveday, C. (2015). Remembering, imagining, false memories & personal meanings. Consciousness and cognition, 33, 574-581.

In this paper, the authors, Conway and Loveday, describe the phenomenon of false memories and simply define the phenomenon as the tendency of individuals to recall something that in all probability did not even happen. The authors opine that people tend to remember what they imagine. As a result, they tend to use as memory and believe what they imagine. They refer to a system known as the remembering imagining system or RIS, in order to highlight the intrinsic links between the imagination of an individual and his memory. They also proceed to discuss two main themes with respect to false memories – that of autobiographical memory and the self memory system. The latter consists of the autobiographical memories, episodic memories and the working self. In other words, the working self is hyper imaginative and is likely to construct its own scenarios and provide cues for imagination. As a result, the working self can construct memories, which may or may not be real. The authors also tackle the concepts of memory accuracy. According to them, since memories are basically reconstructions of the past, they are all false to a certain degree.

However, it must be argued that memory is indeed the ability to absorb information, store it and eventually recall it later. While the hypothesis clearly asserts and highlights the fact that human beings often tend to distort memories, the claim that all memories are false to a certain degree is unjustified. As the article states, with a passage of time, the coherence of a memory or the contents of it, may become distorted or compressed. The authors present memories as mere mental constructions, which may be understating the value of a memory (Conway & Loveday, 2015).

Patihis, L., Frenda, S. J., LePort, A. K., Petersen, N., Nichols, R. M., Stark, C. E., ... & Loftus, E. F. (2013). False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(52), 20947-20952.

Patihis et al. (2013) argue that there may be certain individuals who are immune to distortion of memories or false memories, as they are commonly referred to. Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory or HSAM in some individuals may make them immune to memory distortions. According to these authors, it is the episodic memory that often results in flawed reconstruction of past events. As a result, people often tend to recollect events which may not have happened but were imagined by them. In fact, as the authors show, a person’s emotions are not immune to distortions either, for they tend to be inflated when one reconstructs them. However, there are certain individuals who have been gifted with an exceptional memory and are able to recollect even the minutest of details that have occurred in the past. This is known as hyperthymesia or HSAM. These individuals are able to remember every little detail about a particular event or day and are 97% correct in most cases. The authors thus tested the ability of these HSAM individuals along with controls, so as to understand if they too were vulnerable to memory distortions. The results showed that although the HSAM individuals revealed a greater capability to recall distant events, they too were susceptible to memory distortions.

The most important factor about the article is the fact that it shatters the common perception that people with HSAM would be immune to memory distortions. However, the article is based on a word list false memory test. On the contrary, HSAM is mainly associated with distant events and the ability of individuals to recollect such events with accuracy. Yet, it can be affirmed through the research that irrespective of whether a person has HSAM or not, memory distortions are common since every memory is reconstructed and thus not immune to subjective accounts (Patihis et al., 2013).

References:

Conway, M. A., & Loveday, C. (2015). Remembering, imagining, false memories & personal meanings. Consciousness and cognition, 33, 574-581.

Patihis, L., Frenda, S. J., LePort, A. K., Petersen, N., Nichols, R. M., Stark, C. E., ... & Loftus, E. F. (2013). False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(52), 20947-20952.